Tag «IQ»

Most Russian banks do not skimp on risk management costs. The only exception are aggressive retail lenders too fixated on cost-cutting, said Mikhail Mamonov at the HSE's XV April Conference.

The ability to provide enough food for yourself, and have a surfeit to sell for export, is becoming a way for states to influence world politics and the economy, says Alina Savelyeva, assistant to the Dean at the HSE Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs. In the lecture she delivered at the HSE’s XV April International Conference 'The role of food potential in modern international politics', Savelyeva considers the mechanisms of how food can be a weapon.

The growth of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, etc, have changed our very idea of parentage. The concept of a parent as an integral and inseparable whole is now being broken down into a number of different roles – there are ‘genetic’ mothers, ‘birth’ mothers and ‘feeding’ mothers while fathers can be ‘genetic’ or ‘social’. This atomisation of parenthood explains the prevailing ambiguous attitude towards ART as Olga Isupova, Alexei Belianin and Anna Gusareva showed in their presentation at the HSE XV April International Conference ‘Economic and Social Development’, in the ‘Demography and Labour Markets’ Section.

Russians are failing to cope with debt; small town economies are lagging behind; the Russian market is not favourable for a defined-contribution pension system, and Russian statistics are unsuitable for analysis — these were the top 15 most interesting papers from the HSE's XV April Conference, according to Opec.ru

Many Russians, when asked  whether certain occupations, particularly those of a politician or an academic, are prestigious or desirable,will give a different answer depending on whether they are refering to their own attitudes, perceived societal attitudes, or preferred career choices for their children. So Konstantin Fursov and Valentina Polyakova, research fellows at the HSE's ISSEK, found in their study Monitoring Innovative Behaviour in the Russian Population.

The tension between migrants from the North Caucasus and local residents in Russia is due to cultural and value differences. Migrants share collectivist values, while the local population is more individualistic. Olga Verbilovich and Viktoria Galyapina, researchers at the HSE Laboratory for Socio-cultural Research, investigated the specifics of the mutual attitude between migrants and local residents in Moscow and Stavropol Krai through the use of focus groups.

Some 45% of residents in Russia’s small towns live with loans, and 23% have problems with repayments. A lack of financial literacy is the main cause of the problem. Formal credit has replaced informal borrowing and lending between community members and local retailers, Grigory Yudin and Ivan Pavlyutkin found in their study 'Debt and the Community: Two Debt-driven Economies of Small Towns'.

Nationalism in the post-Soviet republics did not arise solely as a result of the economic and political crisis in the Soviet Union. The longstanding policy of the Soviet elite aimed at forming a multinational state is what enabled it. Authorities sought to use ethnic diversity to strengthen the state structure, but the result was exactly the opposite. A study by Andrey Shcherbak, senior research fellow at the HSE’s Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR).